The distinct features of Saturn, its rings and tilt, could have been caused by an ancient moon that was ripped apart after it came too close to its host planet
Saturn’s Swirling around the planet’s equator, the rings of Saturn are a dead giveaway that the planet is spinning at a tilt. The belted giant rotates at a 26.7° angle relative to the plane in which it orbits the sun. Astronomers have long suspected that this tilt comes from gravitational interactions with its neighbour Neptune, as Saturn’s tilt precesses, like a spinning top, at nearly the same rate as the orbit of Neptune.
But a new modelling study by astronomers at MIT and elsewhere has found that, while the two planets may have once been in sync, Saturn has since escaped Neptune’s pull. What was responsible for this planetary realignment? The team has one meticulously tested hypothesis: a missing moon.
The team proposed that Saturn, which today hosts 83 moons, once harboured at least one more, an extra satellite that they name Chrysalis. Together with its siblings, the researchers suggest, Chrysalis orbited Saturn for several billion years, pulling and tugging on the planet in a way that kept its tilt, or ‘obliquity’, in resonance with Neptune.
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Impact with Saturn
But around 160 million years ago, the team estimates, Chrysalis became unstable and came too close to its planet in a grazing encounter that pulled the satellite apart. The loss of the moon was enough to remove Saturn from Neptune’s grasp and leave it with the present-day tilt.
What’s more, the researchers surmise, while most of Chrysalis’ shattered body may have made impact with Saturn, a fraction of its fragments could have remained suspended in orbit, eventually breaking into small icy chunks to form the planet’s signature rings.
The missing satellite, therefore, could explain two longstanding mysteries: Saturn’s present-day tilt and the age of its rings, which were previously estimated to be about 100 million years old — much younger than the planet itself.
Jack Wisdom, professor of planetary sciences at MIT and lead author of the new study, said: “Just like a butterfly’s chrysalis, this satellite was long dormant and suddenly became active, and the rings emerged.”
The lost element
In their new study, Wisdom and his colleagues looked to pin down Saturn’s moment of inertia using some of the last observations taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in its ‘Grand Finale’, a phase of the mission during which the spacecraft made an extremely close approach to precisely map the gravitational field around the entire planet. The gravitational field can be used to determine the distribution of mass in the planet.
Wisdom and his colleagues modelled the interior of Saturn and identified a distribution of mass that matched the gravitational field that Cassini observed. Surprisingly, they found that this newly identified moment of inertia placed Saturn close to, but just outside the resonance with Neptune. The planets may have once been in sync, but are no longer.
“Then we went hunting for ways of getting Saturn out of Neptune’s resonance,” Wisdom says.
The researchers re-examined the mathematical equations that describe a planet’s precession, which is how a planet’s axis of rotation changes over time. One term in this equation has contributions from all the satellites. The team reasoned that if one satellite were removed from this sum, it could affect the planet’s precession.
Wisdom and his colleagues ran simulations to determine the properties of a satellite, such as its mass and orbital radius, and the orbital dynamics that would be required to knock Saturn out of the resonance.
They concluded that Saturn’s present tilt is the result of the resonance with Neptune and that the loss of the satellite, Chrysalis, which was about the size of Iapetus, Saturn’s third-largest moon, allowed it to escape the resonance.
Sometime between 200 and 100 million years ago, Chrysalis entered a chaotic orbital zone, experienced a number of close encounters with Iapetus and Titan, and eventually came too close to Saturn, in a grazing encounter that ripped the satellite to bits, leaving a small fraction to circle the planet as a debris-strewn ring.
The loss of Chrysalis, they found, explains Saturn’s precession, and its present-day tilt, as well as the late formation of its rings.
Wisdom concluded: “It’s a pretty good story, but like any other result, it will have to be examined by others. But it seems that this lost satellite was just a chrysalis, waiting to have its instability.”
The study is published in Science.
